In this fascinating ethnography, Katrina Daly Thompson bravely takes on popobawa (literally translated as ‘bat wing’ in Kiswahili), not the legendary shapeshifting creature spoken about sporadically on the Swahili Coast of Tanzania, but rather popobawa discourse. Thompson's work is just as compelling for the questions it does not attempt to answer as it is for the questions it chooses to confront. Thompson does not ask what popobawa does to people but what people do with popobawa. She does not ask what the origins of the popobawa legends, rumours and gossip are but how people shape their own identities in the telling of popobawa stories and press against the boundaries of what can be said and who can exist and be heard in Swahili communities of Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. This approach derives from an understanding that one must tread lightly and nimbly to avoid the traps others (especially Western observers) have been caught up in when approaching popobawa. To wit: the Western enlightenment mentality transfixed on a vision of its own superiority which renders judgements of ultimate meanings without bothering to examine the evidence. All people involved in generating discourse about popobawa are performing some aspect of their identities and doing something in the world with their talk. That speech is a powerful medium that constitutes action in itself and propels further acts in the world is part of the theoretical basis of both the discourse analysis that grounds Thompson's work and also the Swahili speakers of Zanzibar.

Popobawa is constructed specifically as a linguistic ethnography steeped in discourse analysis but also draws liberally from anthropology, performance studies, and folklore studies in the areas of legend, rumour and gossip studies. Eschewing what she describes as a problematic anonymity often found in ethnographies which attributes expressions of ideas to a vague ‘some people’ but offer little hint to how many people or who those people are, Thompson instead employs a method that requires deeper knowledge of the positionality of sources of utterances. In some of the case studies it is primarily the position and status of the interviewee that is known rather than deep biographical knowledge of the individuals. But what is sacrificed in depth is made up for in breadth, skilful discourse analysis, and knowledge of Kiswahili. Each chapter highlights different ways that people use popobawa as a discursive tool. Talk about popobawa is a way for people to broach taboo subjects – to transgress normal rules of polite conversation through the popobawa performative framework. Through talk about popobawa, women breech Muslim expectations of decent speech, others claim cultural expertise, some gay men talk about the forbidden topic of anal eroticism, Western observers represent themselves as too enlightened for ‘African foolishness’ through laughter and summarily positing ‘scientific’ explanations for popobawa, and some men represent themselves as staunchly heterosexual.

Like the trickster popobawa himself/herself, the meaning of popobawa shifts shapes and cannot be confined to a single meaning. Thompson certainly refuses to do so but sticks firmly to an analysis that privileges discourse in a way that is sometimes in danger of reducing popobawa to all talk (broadly defined to include mass media representations). Certainly, there may be other valid ways to approach the study of popobawa but when popobawa is defined as discourse other approaches are de facto invalidated. Perhaps the drive to arrive at a singular meaning is too deep in the western intellectual DNA to completely eradicate the impulse altogether. That being said, Thompson's analysis yields great insights into how certain types of discourse serve as important means to speak around delicate topics and how all of us (including myself!) who engage in the conversation around it are staking claims and representing ourselves as much as we are representing and making our world. Popobawa is written in an engaging and clear manner such that both the approach and the clarity and movement of prose is something to be emulated. Popobawa joins the ranks of zombies, witches and vampire studies of Africa and proves that there is still more to say in the generative discourses of the monstrous and mysterious if we are willing to listen well.